“Credibility” is Obsolete

Lord have mercy, a half-century beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis and almost as many years beyond Vietnam, our erstwhile leaders are still mouthing stale clichés about “credibility.” Remember Dean Rusk saying we went eyeball to eyeball with the Soviets and they blinked? Of course the world almost ended, but never mind.

And to go back a little further into the too-soon-forgotten past, some historians surmise that Truman dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to force an already forthcoming Japanese surrender, but to make ourselves more threateningly credible to the expansionist Soviets as the World War II wound down.

Credibility was the main motif of Secretary of State Kerry’s statement rationalizing possible military action against Syria. If we’re going to kill a few thousand non-combatants in the next few days or weeks, and it looks increasingly as if we are, could we not do it for some better reason than maintaining to the world, as if the world cared, that we are not a pitiful helpless giant?

What is it with my country? It is particularly painful to hear these valorous-sounding, but actually exhausted, toothless locutions from John Kerry, who began his political career with electrifyingly refreshing congressional testimony opposing the Vietnam War, a war pursued on the basis that if we did not maintain a credible presence in Southeast Asia, country after country would fall to the Commies, ultimately the Chinese Commies. Meanwhile the historical record of a thousand years showed that China had been Vietnam’s mortal enemy. Never mind.

Only a day before Secretary Kerry’s rationalizations, we listened to our first black president commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The truth-force of Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to hover above Barack Obama like a tired and angry ghost, because any person with half a brain could feel the cognitive dissonance between the president’s mealy-mouthed obeisance to the mythology of King’s non-violence, and the hellish violence soon to be visited upon Damascus from our cruise missiles. Mr. Obama, Mr. Kerry, surely you cannot have forgotten how steadfastly Reverend King stood against militarism, how he made the connection between inequality at home and the waste of foreign adventures.

Stupid violence because it extends yet further the hatred that so many in the Middle East must feel for our crudely righteous meddling.

Unnecessary violence, because the resolution of the civil war in Syria will not come one whit closer on account of our missiles—even if we kill Assad. There are now too many conflicts folded into the Syrian tangle, the Shia-Sunni conflict, the Iran-Israeli conflict, even the proxy Russian-American conflict.

Hypocritical violence, in view of the U.S. military’s own indiscriminate use of depleted uranium in the Iraq war—and our government’s eagerness to look the other way when Saddam, back when he was our ally, gassed Kurds and Iranians.

Hypocritical violence also because we Americans rationalize our looking to violence as the “solution” to conflict by hiding behind the fig-leaf that gas is so much worse than our other well-trod paths of war-making. It is not gas that is uniquely horrific. It is war itself.

All this being so, there is zero loss of credibility in admitting that there is no military solution to this war, which the world already knows.

This has gotten out of hand. Doesn’t it seem like if you have a friend that is spoiling to fight, and everyone he knows is telling him to calm down, and he just can’t be talked out of it, then its ok to overthrow your friend? or whatever, maybe I’m getting my metaphors mixed up but this shit is out of hand.

Juan

The Empire WANTS chaos, death, destruction, hatred and as many enemies as it can create. This is what it thrives on. Everything else is just rhetoric.

InfvoCuernos

War Pigs!

Juan

“Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death’s construction”
-Black Sabbath

BuzzCoastin

Der Homeland’s violence
besides being a business for the elites
is a psychological reaction to the depersonalization
caused by electric technology

I kill
therefor I am
says Big Homelander

Cortacespedes

Uncle Stupid is just the hired thug. If anyone were really serious about ending the conflict, you’d have to sit Iran/Russia and the Saudis down together and get them to stop sending weapons.
Yeah, good luck with that one.
Regional control and profit, who’s going to give that up?

Hadrian999

you are credible when you act with integrity and do nothing you need to be ashamed of others finding out about. The united states as a nation has forgotten the difference between honor and face.

Juan

The US is a nation run by criminal psychopaths. There’s your problem!

Bob has bitch tits

War is a racket.
Uncle Scam is not the first to perpetuate this fraud, but few can match the expertise of the modern MIC.

jasonpaulhayes

Dan Carlin covers this topic in his latest episode of Hardcore History. Dan eloquently states that ultimately where US credibility comes into question is when we choose to ignore violations to international law where is serves our interests and threaten intervention where it doesn’t.

Simon Valentine

couldn’t not check out this title
even though it was ever only an idea that had credibility
an idea that lacks existence
yet can’t not be

such a critical element
of universal fraud
bowing to strangers
politeness
good
evil
fact of the lack thereof

intelligence

do you even outworld?

kcorb

It’s probably screwing up our war in Afghanistan having all of the jihadist heading to Syria. The clusterfuck in Syria is too tightly contained in Syria so we’re just going to poke it a little so some of that clusterfuck spreads out to the rest of the region.

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